Your 'View' was

January 24, 2001

way off target

To the Editor:

In the Jan. 17 edition of the Gaylord Herald Times, "Our View" reads as if it were written by hysterical left-leaning socialists intent on scaring the readers of Otsego County that when law-abiding citizens carry concealed handguns, it will be dangerous to walk the streets of Gaylord or any of the outlying towns.

Who wrote this "view" for you, Handgun Control, Inc.? To compare the Constitutional right of the Second Amendment with the "dark days of the Cold War" is irrational and more scare-mongering!

Since the 1968 Gun Control Act, which is based nearly word for word on the 1938 Nazi Germany Gun Control Laws, American gun-owners' rights have ever so slowly been diminishing. If the anti-gun politicians and their supporters had their way, our guns would be registered, every gun-owner's address on a list that could be used by the authorities for the confiscation and the total disarming of the law-abiding populace of America in the so-called step to make our streets "safer."

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If anyone with a permit to carry a concealed handgun, uses or misuses that right in any way as to cause the harm of an innocent bystander, or through negligence and carelessness permits a handgun to fall into the wrong hands, that person should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

With the right to carry fire-arms comes the responsibility of that right and the consequences of unjust actions. Unbelievable is the tone of the whole article of your "view"… as such it reads: let us frighten the readers of what is coming. Like Chicken Little, "the sky is falling."

A Professor John Lott and a colleague did an extensive study that was documented in their book, "More Guns, Less Crime," found that states, municipalities, and cities that had laws allowing concealed handguns, had reduced the murder rate by 8.5 percent, reduced rape by 5 percent , and reduced severe assault by 7 percent!

Anti-gunners will now sit on the sidelines waiting for the first person with a concealed carry permit to mess up and break a law or cause in some way the harming of another individual and in glee (secretly, of course) start another anti-Second Amendment campaign to "protect" the citizens from hordes of armed law-abiding people that wanted to be involved in the sustaining of their Constitutional right.

Please note, once the Second Amendment is done away with and our right (not privilege) to own and bear arms no longer exists, how long do you think our First Amendment right to freedom of speech will exist?